Low-key projects keep Horn of Africa famine at bay

Drought in the Horn of Africa threatens 13 million people with starvation and is driving half a million to famine camps. In the past week the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said things are worsening in Sudan. Has nothing changed since 1985, when pop stars sang about feeding Ethiopia?

The conditions are certainly tough. Two successive rainy seasons have failed to deliver, due to a fierce La Niña weather system. The World Meteorological Organization says La Niña is weakening, but is not about to flip to her alter ego, El Niño – so the rains due this month may also be scant.

But the region is by no means a lost cause. Recently I talked to two Africa experts at the FAO. "Of the rural people at risk in Somalia, 10 per cent need food assistance," said Rodrigue Vinet. "That means 90 per cent are coping, and with a very bad situation. That's really quite amazing."

The Somalis' success is not accidental, though. The FAO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others have been helping the region's farmers and herders build drought resilience. A seed network in Somalia selects local varieties of drought-tolerant maize, sorghum and sesame and sells farmers good seed. A veterinary network allows herders to sell enough animals to keep the rest alive. Cash pays for roads, storage for crops, and tanks to trap and store storm water. This all costs a lot less than emergency aid – and, says Vinet, communities that benefit from such projects are coping.

His colleague Jean-Alexandre Scaglia says nomads long ago found the best way to live off this dry land: they herd sheep, goats, cattle or camels between patches of thin, sporadic greenery that appear at different times, never overgrazing any one patch. But there are two problems that threaten this strategy, and their existence.

Unpredictable pasture

One is climate change. Nomads know what green patches to move to once a particular area is grazed. But now the expected pasture is often brown, or the well dry. "The loss of predictability is devastating," says Scaglia.

Two, the disappearance of major diseases like smallpox means the population has boomed. "The region supported about a million pastoralists for centuries," says Scaglia. "Now there are 14 million." Such numbers overshoot the region's carrying capacity, and destroy it by overgrazing, which triggers erosion.

Experiments in Ethiopia and Djibouti show native plants come back to land protected from goats for three years, says Scaglia. So the damage isn't irreversible yet, but soon could be if overgrazing and erosion continue.

The answer is to fund more of the low-key development that the FAO and the Gates Foundation have been backing, because modest prosperity can help bring birth rates down. Yet the FAO has only half the funds it needs to continue its projects this year.

Banned aid

That's the kind of development today's celebrities are singing about. Unfortunately, British TV viewers won't hear it about it. That is because the video above, which has been produced as part of U2 singer Bono's Hungry No More campaign to bring attention to poverty in Africa, has been banned from UK television.

Advertising regulator Clearcast says that the video violates UK rules, as it is not trying to raise money for famine relief but is "directed towards a political end".

Towards development aid that might actually prevent famine, that is. For shame. Watch it here instead.

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